About a year after a city council changeover in West Jordan, Utah, city manager Tom Steele was given a choice: retire, resign or be fired.

Steele retired. But not without first explaining publicly what had happened.

"That's part of the game -- if the council meets on Tuesday night, your job is secure until the next Tuesday night," said Steele, who left his position in March 2011. "But I felt bad that the employees in particular and the community at large would feel I abandoned them. I wanted them to know it wasn't my choice."

Steele is one of six candidates to be the next Longmont city manager. And his departure fits the management style he says he prefers: as transparent as possible.

On Friday, the Longmont City Council interviewed the candidates for the city manager's job.

On Tuesday, the council is expected to meet to discuss the hire.

One note: That's transparent. Not translucent.

"Too many communities just put their budgets online and say 'Now I'm transparent,'" Steele said. "That's baloney. By definition, that's translucent -- light shines through, but without clarity. Have you made things clear and understandable?"

If he gets the job, it won't be Steele's time working in Colorado.

From 1987 to 1991, he was the city manager of Woodland Park; from 1997 to 2001, he was a development consultant for projects along the Front Range, including one near 17th Avenue and Pace Street in Longmont.

"It seems like a middle-ground community," Steele said of Longmont. "It's got some of the social responsibility focus that's an attribute of the Boulder area, but at the same time, it has a pretty practical bent."

Steele got out of college near the end of the Vietnam War with a political science degree and not much idea what to do with it.

After being told to report for the draft, he joined the Army Security Agency. From there, he said, he almost followed some friends into hospital administration, but a brother who was a city planner got him curious about the field.

So he got his master's in public administration. And from 1974 on, that led him on a tangled crisscross around the West: from huge Santa Ana, Calif., to tiny Woodland Park, then to Walla Walla, Wash.

He went to West Jordan in 2001 as the assistant city manager and moved to the top job by 2009. With a population of 104,000, it was the largest city he had ever managed.

"When I took on the position, I told the staff I was going to say two things," Steele said. "Feel free to challenge me -- but understand that anything you bring to me, I will also challenge."

At that time, the city had plenty of challenges. When he came in as assistant city manager, Steele said, West Jordan was growing at 7 percent a year. Many thought it would stay that way, he said, and a lot of younger city employees had never known anything else.

By the time he became city manager, the recession was on and the city had hit the wall.

"I brought some rhyme and reason to the process," he said.

Among other things, 30 positions were eliminated, including 15 layoffs. That was the worst, he said.

"That's hard," Steele said. "It doesn't matter the necessity behind it or the rationale behind it. That's hard. I had a great bunch of employees who worked with me to make the impact as little as possible, but it does hurt."

Overall, he said, the differences between the cities he managed were differences in scale, not ones of kind. That was especially true of economic development, he noted, where you always had to learn how to play to your strengths.

In Woodland Park, that might mean going for research-oriented folks who wanted a place set back in the mountains. In West Jordan, it meant selling how quickly the permits could be processed; a two-year procedure in California would typically be six months in Utah.

And don't bet too much of the public's money doing it.

"In my view, you shouldn't be using the taxpayers' money to subsidize things that don't give a return to the taxpayer," he said. "It's got to be a real investment."

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